Amata K.K. is a Japanese studio currently working on virtual reality (VR) escape room experience Last Labyrinth. The developer has recently announced that its Lead Animator Atsuko Fukuyama will be attending the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2019 to give a talk as part of the events Animation Bootcamp.
Fukuyama will be holding a session titled “Animating Memorable Characters that Communicate Without Words”, in collaboration with colleague Alexis Broadhead (3D Animator and Technical Artist). The session will focus on the techniques she uses to help players feel connected to characters that are unable to speak or unable to use words the player understands, with Fukuyama pulling examples from Last Labyrinth.
The Lead Animator is best known for being a key member of the ICO and Shadow of the Colossus teams, animating Yorda and Agro respectively. Again, these are two more characters that connect to players without speech or recognizable words.
Last Labyrinth is a VR escape room experience with a difference. Players awake in a strange mansion to find themselves strapped to a wheelchair. Rather than being able to explore by themselves, they find that they are unable to move this chair located in the middle of a dark, dilapidated room. From the darkness, a mysterious girl named Katia appears who speaks a strange language that’s incomprehensible, however, players need her help to unravel the puzzles and find a way out of the mansion.
GDC 2019 takes place in San Francisco, California from 18th – 22nd March, playing host to some of the biggest (and smallest) videogame developers from across the globe. While CES 2019 last week handled all the hardware tech, GDC is purely about the games, featuring plenty of new announcements as well as lots of sessions for developers to learn more. As part of the conference, for the first couple of days, will be the Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC), where studios can learn and share best practices to create augmented reality (AR) and VR experiences.
Last Labyrinth is expected to launch worldwide in Spring 2019, supporting HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR and Windows Mixed Reality headsets. As further details on the videogame are released VRFocus will keep you updated.